java report - a complex question

(1) Has anyone integrated Crystal Reports Report Engine ActiveX control with a Java Application. My only real requirement is that I stick to the Sun VM - I have heard that there is a bridge available in J++ but requires MS VM to run. Is there any other way to launch Crystal reports (with some parms) from SUN's VM?

Hi One report tool(Enterprise Reports 4.0) is available for java development. That tool can be downloaded from the site www.enterprisesoft.com. This was developed in Java , so it is quite useful for all java based reports....Enjoy.. regards sathiyamoorthy (mp_sathya@hotmail.com)

Here's the real skinny on reports. I have spent almost a year, and have tried all reporting solutions for Java. The Inet Crystal wrapper is worthless. You will get little support from a 3 man company like them. Enterprise report is good as long as you are serving your reports from a report server. What this means is that the reports need to be genereated before users request them, and that only happens when you have the same query running all the time. The Microsoft solution does require using the Microsoft JVM. Which to many is not an option. Which leads us to the final possible solution. Jintegra. This is also a Java to Com bridge like the MS solution, however you can use any JVM. The only problem I have had with them is that I can't get it to work on the client. However, many people have, and it is pretty much my ineptitude that has made it not work. Otherwise, there are some other Reporting tools for Java, but they are all incredibly slow, including Enterprise reports. Of couse, if you want to use a web browser to display your reports, you can disregard all that I have written, because we don't use HTML or the web here, so I haven't tested that arena Mark

I tend to disagree with the Inet Crystal wrapper being worthless. Maybe they have 3 people and support sucks but we are able to reuse Crystal Reports built by Crystal Report experts and instantly deploy them within Tomcat with no pain. We have an open standards interface that allows the Crystal Report author to Write, Upload, and Deploy a report without any JAVA knowledge whatsoever. It took our Java guys about 3 days to write the ReportWriter code and now they can move on to other things and not worry about deploying, changing, or fixing reports. Personally, this engine is ideal [ February 24, 2004: Message edited by: Dave Howard ]